Domain adaptive answer extraction for discussion boards

Ankur Gandhe, Dinesh Raghu, Rose Catherine

Abstract: Answer extraction from discussion boards is an extensively studied problem. Most of the existing work is focused on supervised methods for extracting answers using similarity features and forum-specific features. Although this works well for the domain or forum data that it has been trained on, it is difficult to use the same models for a domain where the vocabulary is different and some forum specific features may not be available. In this poster, we report initial results of a domain adaptive answer extractor that performs the extraction in two steps: a) an answer recognizer identifies the sentences in a post which are likely to be answers, and b) a domain relevance module determines the domain significance of the identified answer. We use domain independent methodology that can be easily adapted to any given domain with minimum effort.